Most of my career has been writing about iconic spaces impossible to forget, and light, I have come to believe, is where that awareness begins. A room's beauty and meaning are rarely related to any single material, or object, or proportions, but about what happens when light and shadow converge.
The moment I walked into the Lasvit glassworks in Nový Bor, I understood for the first time that this quality of light actually begins in the hands of people who spend their lives working with a material that gives them only split seconds to decide. The team moves around the furnace in a rhythm that has barely changed in centuries: gathering, shaping, blowing, cooling. Each member judges by eye and by instinct exactly how far the glass can be pushed before it yields or breaks. A designer's vision can only become light in a room where a craftsperson sees, in that instant, how far to take it. It is here that history and innovation are both honoured – in the same piece, and often in the same breath.
That is the story Lasvit and Rizzoli tell in The Art of Bohemian Glassmaking. It is an invitation behind the scenes into a culture of glassmaking that has developed in this small corner of Northern Bohemia over hundreds of years, and into the particular way Lasvit has chosen to carry it forward.
Oki Sato of Nendo, who has travelled from Japan to work with Lasvit many times, put it simply: the most exciting part is not controlling the process of blowing, but seeing what surprises it produces.
A book like this, a conversation with the wider world, offers a rare moment to stop, reflect, and take stock of the connection between a Bohemian technique refined a century ago and a piece being blown today in the same way it always has been. The craftsman and the designer each bring a different visual language to the same molten sand, and generations of glassmakers have passed on knowledge learned by watching, by feel, by the thousand small corrections the hand understands how to make after years at the furnace.
I hope you will find that this is a book to read and enjoy on many levels. It tells a moving story and shares details that will be new to many readers. While it is a history, it is also Lasvit’s manifesto, and determination to keep tradition alive through their unique vision, innovation, and creativity.
LASVIT: The Art of Bohemian Glassmaking is published by Rizzoli International Publications, and will be available from October in select bookshops internationally.
